Social Responsibility

What happened in our society to doing something simply because it is the right thing to do to improve the quality of people’s lives in our community?

We are clawing our way out of this large financial crisis because corporate greed led big business to ignore what was the responsible approach to lending.

We have had millions of people that are uninsured and millions more that are suffering being under-insured in healthcare in our society for decades. The rest of the world saw it as being in society’s best interest to make sure that affordable health care was available to all citizens so that they could live happy, healthy, productive lives. Why then has it taken us as a society to even make a step in the direction of what is in society’s best interest?

Gone are the days where we had politicians that we could look up to that made the right decisions not because it was good for their political career, but because it was the right thing to do. Teddy Roosevelt breaking up the trusts, FDR taking us to war to fight a sweeping wave of injustice, and those who followed, the creation of social security and Medicare.

Today, however, public policy is determined by what lobby’s can get them the most votes or can contribute the most campaign contributions.

As pharmacists I believe that we need to lobby our own employers, especially those who work for the large pharmacy corporate giants, to change focus from product distribution to clinical disease management services. We need to lobby for marketing based on the quality of our medication knowledge and management skills rather than the distribution convenience and efficiency. If we do not undertake this challenge, our profession could be in jeopardy …

I am not sure what the answer is. I hope this blog and others like it can, in some small way, help to mobilize a grass roots effort to stimulate people to think of the larger picture. Think of not what is best for one’s current interests, but what one sees as in the best long-term interest for the future of our community.

A man named John Kennedy once said: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”. Maybe … Just maybe … if we focus on our community first, that effort may yield a better environment for our future that could pay us back ten-fold.

But what it comes down to, is either way we pay for it. When people go to the emergency room for treatment who cannot afford care, we pay for it with increased premiums. The thing is though, I would rather pay the cheaper cost of preventative care (which is the right thing to do anyways), and that only makes people potentially more happy/productive contributing members of society and the economy. Bankruptcies due to health care costs ultimately secondary to not having adequate access to routine preventative care help no one.